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456 Berea Street

Temporary absence

For the next few months I will be on a combination of parental leave and vacation. Well, that isn't completely true since I still have one week of work to get through, but when June comes around it's time to switch off and unplug my computer.
That isn't entirely true either. I won't actually be unplugging my computer all the time, but I will not be checking my email regularly (i.e. don't expect a response if you send me email) and I will try hard to avoid reading any blogs or keeping up with what's new in the world of web design and development.
The current plan is to return some time in September, but don't take that as a promise. Neither do I promisenotto break the silence if something that calls for a quick post shows up ;-).
See you later, hope you stay subscribed, and thanks for reading.
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Posted inLife.
Validation statistics from Nikita the Spider

About a year and a half ago I mentionedNikita the Spider: a bulk validation and link checking toolas a useful quality assurance tool. Well,Nikita the Spiderhas received a lot of fixes since then and has recently been taken out of beta. It is no longer completely free, but the first 125 pages it crawls will cost you nothing.
But what may be more interesting is what Nikita finds when it crawls a site. Philip Semanchuk, Nikita's author, has analysed the statistics Nikita collected during March 2008 and walks you through the results inBy The Numbers– March 2008. A few highlights:
- The most common validation error is neglecting to specify analtattribute forimgelements
- The second most common error is failing to escape ampersands
- XHTML doctypes are much more common than HTML doctypes
- Over sixty percent of the crawled pages use a transitional doctype
Of course these statistics are only representative of a very small sample of the pages that exist on the web. In addition to that, those pages live on sites that somebody has actually asked Nikita to crawl, so it is likely that they are more aware of web standards than the average website owner/author/developer.
It's still interesting reading though.
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Posted in(X)HTML,Web Standards.
Authentic Jobs API and Affiliates program

If you've been looking for a new job or looking to hire a skilled web professional you may have come acrossAuthentic Jobs. You may also have noticed that there have been Authentic Jobs listings on this site for some time.
The news is that now anyone can display job listings on their site. You can also make some money when someone you refer posts a listing on Authentic Jobs.
To display job listings you will need to apply for anAuthentic Jobs API key, and once you have that you can start doing all sorts of with the job listing data. Find more details on that inThe Authentic Jobs API Documentation.
Even if you don't want to display job listings you can become an affiliate by applying forThe Authentic Jobs Affiliate Program. Once you're approved you will get a personal code that you can use when referring people to Authentic Jobs. For each new full-time listing posted as a result of your referral you will get USD 75, and for each freelance listing your award will be USD 25.
If you're completely new to Authentic Jobs, it is "a targeted destination for standards-aware designers and developers and the companies seeking to hire them." In other words, it is a place where companies looking for modern web professionals can find talent.
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Posted inJob openings.
What does Acid3 mean to you and me?

So, last week two browser vendors proudly announced that their rendering engines now achieve a 100/100 score on theAcid3 Browser Test: Opera (Opera and the Acid3 Test) and Apple (WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build).
Getting a 100/100 score does not mean that the browser has completely passed the Acid3 test, since there are other criteria as well - the animation has to be smooth and the final page has to be a pixel perfect match of the reference rendering. Despite that, it's great news to see browser vendors in a battle to implement standards first. Too bad the biggest two in terms of market share - Firefox and Internet Explorer - didn't take part in the Acid3 race.
What I'm wondering is if, how, andwhen, this will help Web designers and developers like you and me. How long will it take for the other vendors to catch up enough that the standards that are tested by Acid3 can be used reliably? And what parts of the Acid3 test checks stuff that we really can't wait to use?
What's your thinking on this?
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Posted inBrowsers,Web Standards.
Designing Web Navigation (Book review)

What? An entire book just about designing navigation on the Web? Yes, that's right. And if you think about it for a while you'll probably realise that there is a need for a book on that subject. Heck, considering the number of sites out there that are incredibly hard to navigate, there is room for plenty of books that explain how to create Web navigation that works.
And you're very likely to have run into problems more than once when trying to figure out how to make a website or Web application easy and intuitive not only for yourself, but for your own or your client's end users, to find their way around.Designing Web Navigationby James Kalbach aims to help you master the fundamentals of navigation design. While there is no guarantee that you willmasterthe subject, reading this book will definitely give you a lot of insight into the problems that you encounter in navigation design as well as possible solutions to those problems.
The wayDesigning Web Navigationis structured makes it usable not only as a book you read from cover to cover, but also as a reference to keep handy for the next time a tricky navigation problem shows up. It can also give you arguments to use in discussions with clients or other team members when there is something that doesn't feel quite right about the solution somebody is suggesting but you can't put it into words. In fact, it may also make you look at the problem from a different angle and realise that maybe your solution isn't the best one.
The author starts the first part of the book by explaining the foundations of Web navigation. Those foundations include why we even need navigation in the first place, how we use Web browsers to interact with websites, the most common types of navigation on the Web, and how we can label navigation to make it easy to understand.
The second part of the book is called "A Framework for Navigation Design", and is focused on providing you with a systematic approach to designing Web navigation. It does that by describing a number of phases that you will often move through while turning a concept into a working navigation system.
In the third and final part, James Kalbach takes a closer look at navigation in special contexts, such as before and after searching, in social tagging systems, and how Web applications can be navigated.
Throughout the book there are many references to accessibility and internationalisation issues that can be caused by some types of navigation. It's great to see that those two very important aspects of Web navigation aren't overlooked here as they are in many other places.
Overall this is a great book that I enjoyed reading. The examples and references are current and credible. One area that has room for improvement is the layout and typography, which I think could be more usable. Line-length is a bit too long for the book to be a really comfortable read, and page numbers are smaller than the text on websites designed by ad agency art directors.
But don't let that discourage you from picking up a copy of this book. My impression is that there is a lot of research behind this book, and I think all web designers and front-end developers can learn something from it.
Designing Web Navigation
Author:James Kalbach
ISBN-10:0596528108
ISBN-13:978-0596528102
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Posted inReviews,Usability.